Installation with Ansible

Instructions for the installation and configuration of Istio using Ansible.

Prerequisites

The following instructions require Ansible 2.4. Additionally Kubernetes 1.7.3 or newer is required.

The following prerequisites must be met if using OpenShift.

Minimum Version: 3.7.0
oc configured to be able to access the cluster
User has logged in to the cluster
User has admin role on OpenShift

Deploy with Ansible

Important: All execution of the Ansible playbooks must take place in the install/ansible path of Istio.

This playbook will download and install Istio locally on your machine. To deploy the default settings of Istio on OpenShift, the following command may be used:

$ ansible-playbook main.yml

Customization with Ansible

The Ansible playbook ships with reasonable defaults.

The currently exposed options are:

Parameter	Description	Values	Default
`cluster_flavour`	Define the target cluster type	`k8s` or `ocp`	`ocp`
`github_api_token`	A valid GitHub API authentication token used for authenticating with GitHub	A valid GitHub API token	empty
`cmd_path`	Override the path to `kubectl` or `oc`	A valid path to a `kubectl` or `oc` binary	`$PATH/oc`
`istio.release_tag_name`	Istio release version to install	Any valid Istio release version	the latest Istio release version
`istio.dest`	The directory of the target machine where Istio will be installed	Any directory with read+write permissions	`~/.istio`
`istio.auth`	Install with mutual TLS	`true` or `false`	`false`
`istio.namespace`	Kubernetes namespace where Istio will be installed	any namespace may be specified	`istio-system`
`istio.addon`	Istio addons to install	array containing any of `grafana`, `prometheus`, `zipkin`, `jaeger`, or `servicegraph`	all addons are enabled by default
`istio.delete_resources`	Delete resources created under Istio namespace	`true` or `false`	false
`istio.samples`	Array containing the names of the samples that should be installed	`bookinfo`, `helloworld`, `httpbin`, `sleep`	none

Default installation

Operator installs Istio using all defaults on OpenShift:

$ ansible-playbook main.yml

Operational overrides

There may be circumstances in which defaults require overrides.

The following commands describe how an operator could use overrides with this Ansible playbook:

Operator installs Istio on Kubernetes:

$ ansible-playbook main.yml -e '{"cluster_flavour": "k8s"}'

Operator installs Istio on Kubernetes and the path to kubectl is explicitly set:

$ ansible-playbook main.yml -e '{"cluster_flavour": "k8s", "cmd_path": "~/kubectl"}'

Operator installs Istio on OpenShift with settings other than the default:

$ ansible-playbook main.yml -e '{"istio": {"release_tag_name": "0.6.0", "auth": true, "delete_resources": true}}'

Operator installs Istio on OpenShift with customized addons:

$ ansible-playbook main.yml -e '{"istio": {"delete_resources": true, "addon": ["grafana", "prometheus", "jaeger"]}}'

Operator installs Istio on OpenShift and additionally wants to deploy some of the samples:

$ ansible-playbook main.yml -e '{"istio": {"samples": ["helloworld", "bookinfo"]}}'

When Jaeger is enabled, Zipkin is disabled even when Zipkin is selected in the addons.

Uninstalling

If a different version of Istio is desired, delete the istio-system namespace before executing the playbook. In this case, the istio.delete_resources flag does not need to be set.

Setting istio.delete_resources to true will delete the Istio control plane from the cluster.

In order to avoid any inconsistencies, this flag should only be used to reinstall the same version of Istio on a cluster.